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After three years of intense focus on therapy and personal growth, I'm finally hitting the keys again and will be jumping into NaNoWriMo on November 1st, 2016. Stay tuned for updates!

Tuesday, 18 December 2012

I AM ADAM LANZA'S MOTHER - Liza Long

After already having another post written for this week (and
with many other topics to choose from), I’ve decided to change directions and
flag this as what I’m stealing this week.
It is a wonderful article from a mother with a son dealing with mental
illness.

In the wake of the shooting in Newtown this week, this
mother responds with her own harrowing tale of what it is like to be a parent
of a potentially violent child and the lack of support available:

This shooting and the response from the world about raising
awareness of mental illness comes at a particularly poignant time for me, as I
am currently working on a play about a family living with a person with
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
This play is inspired from my own experience growing up in home with a
mother suffering from BPD.

Mental illness is very hard to diagnose, let alone treat but
it does not only affect the person suffering from the disease; it touches
everyone around that person as well. With
a lot of types of mental illness, a person can appear just as normal as can be
most of the time; they are usually quite likable and easy to be around. Depending on the illness, you can know a
person for years and never have the slightest inkling that something is
wrong. This is the most alarming part of
it. It is not easy to detect, so it is
not easy to explain or talk about. Often
when you try; you hear the response: everyone gets upset once in awhile. It is hard for the majority of people to
imagine the reality of what you are talking about.

I feel great empathy for Liza’s situation. It is soul-wrenching to be afraid of your
child and have to lock him away for fear of the safety of you other
children. Often, you can’t explain to
the person that you are truly looking out for their own good. They simply don’t believe you and as much as
you tell yourself that they don’t mean the things they say while having an
episode; it still cuts like a knife and is no more pleasant to listen to. In their moments of lucidity, they may say
they understand, but when the next episode occurs, you can’t know what to
expect or if they will seek revenge.

As a child growing up with a mother with mental illness, it
was a much different struggle. She was a
single parent and after sending my older sisters to live elsewhere, we were
alone in the house for most of my life.
The best I could do was lay low and weather the storm whenever she was
in one of her “moods”. But, it was a
life of walking on eggshells. You never
know what would set her off and the affects of growing up in this environment
are clearly evident in my personality today.

I suffer from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder); which is
relatively under control (and serves me surprisingly well in my day job as a
stage manager), but it does manifest itself distinctly at home. I was away for a bit this year and on multiple
occasions had friends staying in my apartment and every time I came home,
within seconds I was putting everything back where “it belongs”, because I
couldn’t function with things out of place.
Eek! I know, try dating me! I know that this comes from living in fear of
doing something simple that would set my mother off. I remember once I didn’t wipe the crumbs off
the counter after making toast and when my mom found them, she proceeded to
yell, scream and shriek for over an hour; saying things like: “I hate you”; “I’m
going to stab myself”; “Asshole”; “I
wish I was dead”. I would sit quietly in
my room and listen, waiting for it to be over.
I had learned by that point that any protests only made things
escalate. I remember being shocked that there were
crumbs because I was usually so good about leaving no trace that I had been in
any room of the house. Sometimes she
would lock herself in the washroom with a knife; which was always particularly
terrible as our carpets in the washroom were red and I couldn’t tell from
peaking under the door whether it was blood or the carpet that I was
seeing. My mother had previously tried
to commit suicide and I found her in the washroom one day when I returned home
from school in Grade 9.

There are many other results of growing up in a home with
mental illness. I’ve been in therapy for
a while now, dealing with some of my issues, but they still plague me on a
daily basis and I never know when something will trigger a memory that shakes
me to the core. That happened recently
at work. A co-worker made a joke about
telling his kid he would throw out her toys if she didn’t put them away. This brought up the long repressed memory of
when my mother would sometimes have a fit and grab garbage bags and start
piling in all our toys and then putting them in the dumpster. All the while, I would sit there watching in
horror and shrieking. I hadn’t thought
of that in years and had to excuse myself for a good cry in the washroom. It was shocking to me. I didn’t realize that I was still susceptible
to hidden landmines like this; lurking in my subconscious.

I was just a kid. This
has been the greatest issue I’ve had to come to terms with (and I still have
not made my peace). Being alone in a
home with someone suffering with mental illness, it fell upon me to be the
support and strength in the home. It has
made me a very strong and resilient person (for which I am grateful), but as I
grew up and learned about life, I realized there was so much more I could have
done: a great lesson at 25, but I have to forgive myself for not taking action
when I was 6, or 11, or even 17. I was
young and scared and I didn’t have a voice then. I needed someone to speak on my behalf.

There are so many people out there; just like me. People who need a voice. People who need someone to say: mental
illness needs treatment and awareness.
We need, as a community, to be responsible for the people in it. When we hear of tragedies, like that in
Newtown, we need to look at ourselves and the people around us and reach
out. We need to stop pointing the finger
at other people and see where our own responsibility lies.

I grew up in an apartment building with very thin
walls. I could hear my mom screaming
from down the hall, which means everyone else in who lived in the hall heard as
well. No one did anything. No one ever called the police or asked if
they could do something to help. It wasn’t
their business. We need to make it our
business.

Liza’s article is one example of a person who is living with
mental illness and in need of help, but not able to receive what she
needs. This story can be told the world
over. It takes courageous people like
Liza to make a difference and speak out.
The play that I have been working on for an upcoming submission deadline,
My Mother’s Daughters, deals with a
family living with mental illness.
Stories like Liza’s, fuels the fire for the necessity of works like
this. Not only to educate people about
the world of mental illness; but as a support for the victims. It is easy to stay quiet when you think you
are alone. My heart goes out to Liza and
her family and I can sympathize with her desperation. I also thank her for telling her story because
for those of us who also suffer as she does, it is good to hear we are not
alone.

My mother’s BPD continues to haunt our family. Her daughters now have very little contact
with her. Something that creates a great
deal of guilt in my life, but it is the only way I have been able to break free
from the psychotic webs in which she snares people. The doctors don’t see the way she is: she is
all smiles and sweetness when she sees them.
They prescribe medication; which she abuses. She now has her medication delivered daily. It is tough to find the support you need,
especially when the person suffering from the illness is resistant to
acknowledging the problem or getting proper treatment. What do you do?

My hope is that one day there will be a greater focus on
promoting mental health within our society.
The stigma associated with therapy needs to go. There is nothing wrong with asking for help
or having an impartial person give you some perspective on the issues in your
daily life. We spend hours in the gym
promoting our physical health; why does an hour a week with a therapist,
promoting our emotional health, give the impression that we are crazy or
mentally unstable? I like having someone
who is paid to listen to me whine and complain each week where I don’t need to
feel guilty about doing so or failing to ask how their day is going. Everyone could benefit from a little
emotional “me time”. The stigma needs to
be dispelled; everyone has their own issues that they need to work out.

When we recognize that everyone could benefit from a little
extra help, we can finally get the help for those who need extra support to
make it through their daily lives.

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Welcome to Art Thief!

After a few failed attempts at creating "themed story" blogs, I have been inspired to create a blog with the true intention of the format: a simple web log of my inspirations as a writer and artist.

This blog is dedicated to Austin Kleon, whose book Steal Like an Artist, has been my primary inspiration.

In this book, Kleon discusses how all art is stolen in some way and a good artist knows what is worth stealing. As artists, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that everything we create is original. We all draw our inspiration from many sources and we steal little gems from each one to develop our own body of work. Kleon's book outlines simple practices to ensure that you keep your art alive; one being: SHARE YOUR WORK.

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Good thieves never reveal their identity... although, good thieves don't likely advertise their plunders to the rest of the world either.

Art Thief, aka AJ, keeps her home in Toronto, Canada; though work often pulls her to every corner of the globe.

AJ is a writer and teacher disguised as a mild mannered stage manager. She loves working in theatre and being able to surround herself with some of the best artists in the industry (while plotting to take over the world with her own work). As a stage manager, AJ is constantly immersed in all forms of art. Talk about inspiration overload! The number of stories and characters that fill each day is more than any writer could ask. The goal now: keep up!

AJ is working on a lot of projects in 2013, including: the first full length run of her play, Empty Boxes; and the launch of Homestead Theatre Project. Stay tuned in the Happenings section of this blog for details.